UK Geocoding – Update
April 11, 2010I’ve updated the UK Geocoding site to provide better documentation, and a UI for geocoding, in addition to the XML API.
UK Geocoding
April 10, 2010After a little hard work, I’m releasing my attempt to address the shortfall in accurate UK geocoding services. Courtesy of open data provided by Ordnance Survey Open Click-Point, some sed, SQLite, PHP and YQL I’ve produced a REST API, and a YQL datatable. I’ve also written a more thorough account of this by way of documenation.
Find Excluding SVN
October 24, 2008So, you need to take a copy of a subversion working copy, but it has local changes that you also need to copy. This precludes the use of `svn export` since the local changes won’t be included. One option is to do an `svn export` anyway, and then `cp -ra` the local changes. Another solution is to use a find command that excludes subversion metadata, and then copy the resulting files:
`find . -path ‘*/.svn’ -prune -o -type f -print`
I did something similar some time ago, but forgot the command, so here it is for posterity.
The New Look
March 7, 2008I decided some time ago that I wasn’t happy with the way this site looked. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to do anything about it. I’ve finally got around to making some changes, the most important of which you may notice is the minimalist design. I don’t know if I plan to change this any time in the future, but for now it will do.
I’ve also tried to pull in some data from other services I use (perhaps not as frequently as I would like) such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. To that end, my recent Twitter tweets are now displayed, together with my Facebook status. I’ve also pulled in some random images from my public Flickr collection.
SSH Tunneling
January 18, 2008Another aide memoire, but again may be useful to some. I’d like the ability to work from home on some web development projects I’m doing at work. Getting the code locally is not a problem thanks to Subversion over ssh However viewing the results can be tricky when you consider that the development server is behind the work network. The answer is SSH tunneling.
Let’s say you can access SERVER_A directly over ssh The service you want to access is on SERVER_B which you can’t access directly via SSH from your local machine. However, you can access SERVER_B from SERVER_A. I’ll assume that you want to access the service locally on port 12345, and that the remove port is port 80. The following command will allow you to access a service on SERVER_B from your local machine.
ssh -Nf -L 12345:SERVER_B:80 username@SERVER_A
The ‘-Nf’ switch says don’t execute a command with this ssh session, and run this ssh process in the background. The first port is the port you want to use locally; the first server is the usually inaccessible remote server you want access to; and the third port is the remote port you want to use. The final argument gives the login to the remotely accessible server you have ssh access to directly.
One caveat to this is if you are trying to access a web site that is defined using Apache virtual hosts. With this command alone, requesting localhost:12345 in Firefox would only direct you to the site that is listening remotely for requests that match ‘localhost’. If you would ordinarily access this site using mysite.server_b, then you need to use that as the address in Firefox on your local machine. Therefore, this needs to be added in /etc/hosts. With that done, you should be able to request mysite.server_b:12345 in Firefox and be directed to the remote “virtual host” site.
